People Are Freaking Out About Half the Internet Going Down (We Assume)

It’s not just you: Twitter is down across the United States. There have also been service interruptions for Spotify, Reddit, Netflix, Imgur, and Wix and Squarespace sites, along with many others — Gizmodo has a full list of sites that users have reported difficulty accessing. How are we supposed to browse dank memes (like “bone apple tea,” my current favorite) now?

So why are so many sites down? According to the website of DNS host Dyn, the outage appears to be the result of at least two major DDoS hacking attacks: one beginning shortly after 7 AM ET, and the other beginning after 12 PM ET. The first attack appears to have primarily targeted the east coast of the United States, and the second seems focused on the west coast and Europe.

The motives for the attacks are at this point unclear. What we do know is that the attacks targeted the Dyn servers, which provide DNS services to some of the biggest sites on the internet.

Here at What’s Trending, we pride ourselves on giving you the internet’s response to major stories like this one. It’s been tough to monitor the internet’s response to this particular story, however, because half the internet isn’t around to comment on it.

This is the part where we usually embed tweets. Uh… there are no tweets. Here on the west coast, Twitter is still down for us. So instead, here’s ten minutes of cute puppies: